MORE LASAGNA GARDENING: TESTING ROCKDUSTS Over a week ago i posted 4 photos of building a lasagna layered growing bed, which is now a 2-page document parked on my website: dyarrow.org/lasagna last week i completed & planted a second bed, composed of three 5-foot sections. the topmost layer of each section is a thin sprinkling of at least a pint of a type of rockdust: powdered Rhyolite, gritty Rhyolite, powdered Carbonatite. these dense magma materials provide slow release minerals & trace elements, plus crystalline & paramagnetic qualities. soil, in truth, is decayed, digested, rotted rock. to be honest, i doubt we will see much difference between the three sections. these beds are so chock full of goodies, so light, open & porous, so bursting with thriving microbes, so packed & stacked to grow outrageous vegetables, i doubt a thin dusting of stone flour on top will show much difference. but you never know what you might learn until it happens. Carbonatite is a remarkable rockdust from northern Ontario, Canada -- deep, dense, ancient, unweathered, highly paramagnetic plug of magma from the planets mantle, with significant calcium, potassium, phosphorus, trace elements, and heaviest metals. It also reacts with atmosphere to convert CO2 to carbonates, thus Carbonatite sequesters carbon while it buffers soil chemistry and feeds soil biology. the Rhyolites are deep, dense, ancient magma from a 1.3 billion-year-old caldera in southern MO. and since transport is the overwhelming cost of rockdusts, we must test local sources with qualities that may approximate Carbonatite. Carbonatite and one of the Rhyolites are ground to talcum powder dust particle size. they almost flow like lumpy water, drift away in any wind, and thus are hard to handle and spread. i prefer to blend these ultra-micronized materials with biochar to provide more bulk while widely disbursing dust all over lightweight particles of char, ready to be adsorped when moistened with water. packaged in char, the dusts are easier to handle, and spread more evenly and intimately. this week, i began a third bed with four 5-foot sections to test 4 different microbe inoculants: SumaGrow, Agrigro, Biogrow & BioAg. already, the squash & amaranth in the first bed are beginning to rocket into furious growth. so, so despite a very late start, seems these new beds made from scrounged materials will give a good show of edible bounty this year.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 03:53:03 +0000
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